Snow Like Ashes (Snow Like Ashes, #1)(80)

My hands go back to his head. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, my forehead pressed to his matted hair. He squirms, a flicker of life in my palms. “I’ll make this better, somehow, I’ll save you.”

This is so wrong. And I can’t change it, couldn’t stop it, made it worse—I did this to him.

A chill turns my limbs to ice, makes my lungs freeze so much I’m sure frost puffs out with my breath. Everything about me turns to snowy chill, my hands hardening in a cage around the boy’s head. So wondrously cold, every fiber in me twisting like ice-covered branches in a forest. Am I slipping away now? Is the horror of this pushing me to death?

This was how I felt when Sir died. This uncontainable chill, everything in me going numb.

Soldiers break through the snowy vortex of my panic, their rough fingers grabbing me and hauling me up, yanking the whip off my arm and tearing me away from the boy. I pull against their grip, kicking out at them, fighting to get back to the child.

The boy peeks at me from between his fingers, his blue eyes rimmed with tears and . . .

Relief.

He’s relieved. I gawk, not sure if what I’m seeing is real or some distorted image I want to be real with all my heart. My eyes travel past his face to his back, his back that should be bloody and gruesome, but . . . isn’t now. His torn shirt shows clean white skin gleaming in the hot sun, not a scar or a scrape or a single lingering cut. Like he was never whipped at all.

The soldiers holding me notice it too. Everyone feels it, this moment, echoing through the Winterians as they’re filled with the same relief. He’s healed.

A wave of cold slides through me, and I want to bask in it forever, let icy flakes coat my body, whisk me away to somewhere peaceful and safe. No one else around me seems aware of the sudden cold I feel, and I wonder if I’m hallucinating.

The soldiers wake from their stupors before I do. Their hands tighten on my arms, fingers slipping in the blood that cakes my skin from where the whip bit into my forearm. They drag me away, through the crowd of Winterians who gape as I pass.

She brought the ramps down. She healed the boy.

A Winterian man steps forward. One of the many who looked at me with suspicion and hatred, who echoed Conall’s distrust of me. His face relaxes in a smile so genuine and pure I expect the entire foundation of Abril to shatter in two, and he lifts his arms into the air, tips his head back, and screams. His cry of joy is the shock wave that sets off the rest, the screams and cries rippling through the Winterians like their excitement had been building since the first post snapped. Spring soldiers look up from the bodies of their dead comrades, their fallen ramps. Their prisoners have never had such joy before. How do they stop it?

I’m so lost in the euphoria around me that I don’t notice the guards dragging me back into Abril until the gate closes behind me. But even as the heavy iron bars drop into place, the cold in my body doesn’t dissipate. The Winterians’ cheers don’t fade.

Angra can hear them, I’m sure. He can feel the shift in the air, the joy spreading like wafting flurries of snow through the Abril work camp. My grin returns, bursting across my face.

Soon he’ll know the blizzard started with me.





CHAPTER 25

THE CLOSER WE get to Angra’s palace, the more my relief and amazement fade.

This is the moment I’ve feared since I arrived, when Angra will torture me into submission. He’ll make me beg for death until I tell him how I brought down the ramps, how I healed that boy, and when I don’t explain it—can’t explain it, at least not the boy—he’ll make Herod break me.

A shiver eats up my insides. No, I’m not afraid of Herod. I’m not afraid of Angra. I’m not afraid.

But Angra will kill me before I talk to Nessa again. Before I can do anything else to help them, maybe even save them. And after seeing what happened to the boy . . .

I want to dissolve in a fit of incredulous laughter as the soldiers pull me through Abril. The boy is all right. Even as I think it, shock chases away my need to laugh, snuffing it out like a candle getting sucked up into wind.

How did I do that?

Nessa, Conall, and Garrigan look up from their work in Angra’s garden as we pass. Nessa’s expression flashes from numb to panicked in two blinks, her body coiling with helpless realization. She surges toward me but Garrigan stops her, wraps his arms around her as he whispers something quick and low in her ear.

Conall sees me too, his glare dangerously dark. I tear my eyes away from him before I can see his disappointment, before his eyes tell me, I knew you would die too.

I won’t die. Not today. Not after what happened, what I did, what I can do for them. But what can I do for them? I don’t even know how I did it, where it came from—I healed the boy.

I healed him.

“Leave us.”

Angra’s voice ricochets around the throne room. A group of high-ranking advisers stands huddled around his dais, the black suns and gold trim on their uniforms gleaming in the filtered light from the holes above. They turn away at his command, all eyes falling on the battered Winterian girl two of his soldiers drag down the long walk to the throne.

One of the advisers is Herod. He smirks and eyes his king like he’s asking for permission, but Angra’s voice booms out again.

“I said leave us.”

The advisers gather the papers they had scattered on tables around Angra’s dais and file out through various doors. I’m left draped between the two soldiers at the base of the dais. Angra leans back in his throne, one hand as usual clutching his staff. His green eyes are sharp and deadly, and he stares at me as if I’m a prized dog he’s considering buying.